Obamacare: the brief roundup

IBD: President Obama said his overhaul will “bring greater competition, choice, savings and efficiencies to our health care system.”

Ryan: It will do the opposite of all three of those. It will mean less competition and less choice because it narrows the options consumers will have to get health insurance. It puts everybody on a glide path to go into an exchange where people will have three choices of policies — gold, silver and bronze. It standardizes health insurance and takes underwriting out of health insurance, which is how many insurers compete. At the end of the day you’ll have a few big insurers selling different versions of the same color. With the kinds of mandates and rules they impose on insurers, the small and medium-sized insurance companies simply can’t compete because they don’t have the economies of scale. What you’ll simply have are these handful of really large insurers simply becoming claims processors for federally run health insurance.

One example. There is a medium-sized insurer in Milwaukee that has 2,200 employees, 1,600 in Milwaukee. They sell in the individual market and they have the biggest share of policies with health savings accounts. If this bill becomes law, they’ll have to close because of the rules and regulations. That means they lay off the 1,600 people in Milwaukee and send out cancellation notices to their 1.3 million policyholders.

The only ones that will survive are the really big companies. That will make prices go up. And what’s so insidious from an entitlement standpoint is it’s an open-ended entitlement that says to everyone who makes under $100,000, if your health care expenses exceed 2% to 9.8% (depending on income level), don’t worry, taxpayers will pay the rest of it. That is an invitation of cost explosion.

“In speech after speech on his health care plan, the President has tried to convince us that what he is proposing will be good for America. But, how can it be good for America if it raises taxes by a half trillion dollars and costs a trillion dollars or more to implement? In addition, how can it be good if it takes another half a trillion dollars away from seniors on Medicare, and still includes all the backroom deals you have been hearing about for months?

itting in an airport, on his way home to Michigan, Rep. Bart Stupak, a pro-life Democrat, is chagrined. “They’re ignoring me,” he says, in a phone interview with National Review Online. “That’s their strategy now. The House Democratic leaders think they have the votes to pass the Senate’s health-care bill without us. At this point, there is no doubt that they’ve been able to peel off one or two of my twelve. And even if they don’t have the votes, it’s been made clear to us that they won’t insert our language on the abortion issue.”

According to Stupak, that group of twelve pro-life House Democrats — the “Stupak dozen” — has privately agreed for months to vote ‘no’ on the Senate’s health-care bill if federal funding for abortion is included in the final legislative language. Now, in the debate’s final hours, Stupak says the other eleven are coming under “enormous” political pressure from both the White House and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). “I am a definite ‘no’ vote,” he says. “I didn’t cave. The others are having both of their arms twisted, and we’re all getting pounded by our traditional Democratic supporters, like unions.”

If you watch cable news this weekend (which, if you a normal and well-adjusted person, you probably won’t), you’ll likely hear a lot of discussion about the so-called Slaughter Solution, a procedural manuever that House Democrats are considering in hopes of making it easier to pass health care reform. NRO’s Daniel Foster and Slate’s John Dickerson have posted detailed explanations, but the gist is this: Rather than vote up or down on the Senate bill (which many House Democrats don’t like), the House would instead vote to pass a reconciliation bill that amends the Senate bill. Attached to the reconciliation bill would be a rule that says that once it’s passed, the original Senate bill is automatically considered passed too.

The result is that House Democrats get to vote for the reconciliation fixes but can say that, technically, they never voted to pass the bad Senate bill.
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So, as I understand it, if this strategy works, here’s what will happen. First, the House will vote on the reconciliation bill that 1) includes the student loan bill 2) amends the Senate bill and 3) triggers the passage of the Senate bill in the House. After that happens, the Senate will have the option to vote on the reconciliation bill, thus passing both the student loan legislation and the changes to the health bill.

I’m suspecting some journalistic rope-a-dope here because in the end, it’s all about furthering the progressive agenda and the MSM will always team with liberalism… they quintessentially define and represent it.